The story that I read on the news yesterday evening was so ugly it genuinely crushed my spirit for the night. It wasn’t written as an ugly story, which made it worse.
It was actually written up as something that we were to be amazed and proud of.
Some idiot in south FL had hooked himself a 350 pound Warsaw Grouper and they had a picture of Mr N. E. Anderthal grinning from ear to ear with his catch suspended upside down on a hook.
This fish swam the seas for over 50 years before ending on this idiot’s hook and for what purpose? Sport. Yes. Mr N. E. Anderthal and the whole family of neanderthals are avid sports fisher-folk.
You know if someone fishes in order to eat a fish for their supper, I have absolutely no problem with that. If someone living in the wilderness and surviving on whatever he catches, happens to kill and eat a deer, again I have no problem with it.
But when some idiot with issues in the bedroom chooses to end the life of a living creature so he can get a mental hard-on, I have a real problem with it.
Mankind commits so much injustice against this planet and the creatures that live on it. But most of it is through accident or indifference. It takes a special breed of human to willfully look down the barrel of their gun, or cast their hook, or harpoon any living creature, and label that as fun.
So yes (rant over) by the time I lay my head on the pillow, I felt dirty and ugly. As humans, we are all dirtied by these actions.
When I opened my eyes this morning, I needed to ground myself again and in so doing, maybe I could find a path beyond the ugliness.
For me, sunrises are unique moments on so many levels and they become a means by which I can reboot and refresh my outlook on things.
The colors of each shade that breaks across the horizon, paint over the ugliness with a fresh coat of beauty.
I hope you like this little collection of images from this morning at the end of the post.
It worked beautifully as as I raced off into the new week with a feeling of joy and appreciation beneath each step.
So it got me to thinking that whenever we encounter something ugly that makes us sick to our stomach, the best medicine is actually to deliberately seek out something beautiful and then gorge ourselves with it.
By allowing the ugly to linger as the last experience you have, you allow it to take root and fester within you.
We are immersed in shock headlines, subjected to work stresses, exposed to so many personal tragedies, that at times it seems ugly is all around us.
But the honest truth is that there is much more beauty around us, if we just make the effort to find it. It won’t come land on our laps and requires just a willingness and belief in finding it.
Whatever the ugly that threatens to steal your time on earth, identify and then reach out for something that you find beautiful. It can be a place, a person, a song, … literally anything that gives you joy.
Believe it or not, most of our life’s experience comes from within us. If we live within the walls of ugly, then ugly will dominate our outlook and shape our dreams.
But if we find beauty, then we look forward, dream big, and imagine a life that may be better than any moment that we pass through.
For me, that’s a sunrise … it marks that moment when night is finally over and the day ahead can be anything we want it to be.
And I want … no, I insist it be beautiful!
